The Smithian

MEXTRÓPOLI will...forge links between citizens and architects, designers, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, artists and politicians, and will examine the question of what a desirable metropolis could be. MEXTRÓPOLI also aspires to position Mexico City as an epicenter of architecture and a leader in creative transformation...

Widening the 405 is like finding a slightly bigger sponge to throw in the ocean, whereas a north-south line along that corridor is ideal. Getting rail to LAX, which I'm committed to doing. With the Expo Line, if you live on the far west side, you'll have an option next year to go from 'the sand to the symphony' in 40 minutes. And the Crenshaw Line will be a gamechanger for South Los Angeles." —Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

...few places in America represent the urban trauma of the 1960s more than [Newark, New Jersey]. Deindustrialization, corruption, suburban flight and calamitous planning gutted its core, tore up neighborhoods...The...toxic environment was encapsulated in the desecration of the Passaic River, which borders Newark. It became a dumping ground for dioxin from the defunct Diamond Shamrock Chemicals Company, which manufactured Agent Orange.

a quiet upheaval is turning that river, polluted as it may be, into a front line of reclamation. It’s a common approach these days, from Seoul to Madrid to San Francisco: upgrading cities by revamping ravaged waterfronts.

...the High Line will be copied endlessly, each time with a little less sincerity and a little less skill, until 30 or 40 years from now when today’s hipsters are nearing retirement age, the concept will seem as cheesy and dated as South Street Seaport—an obvious Fisherman’s Wharf knockoff—seems today. But the High Line...does what any great work of visual art does, which is to take an inchoate emotional sense shared by a large group of people and make it concrete, visible in three dimensions. What you make of it is largely determined by what you think of its underlying subject, which in this case is gentrification. If you are part of the community pushed out by the new wealth gentrification inevitably brings, then no doubt the High Line’s precious attention to symbols of decay and ruin... will seem calculated to piss you off. If, on the other hand, you are part of a gentrifying wave...then the High Line will seem to be singing from your hymnal...

...attempts to remedy the problems that arise from lack of housing in inner-city Stockholm, one of the fastest growing metropolises in Europe, by exploiting the free space offered in Swedish courtyards...